Earth Hour comes to every time zone at 8:30 PM today. Will it make a difference?
Their website says:
On Earth Hour hundreds of millions of people around the world will come together to call for action on climate change by doing something quite simple—turning off their lights for one hour. The movement symbolizes that by working together, each of us can make a positive impact in this fight, protecting our future and that of future generations. Learn more about how Earth Hour began, what we’ve accomplished, and what is in store for 2010.
As many WUWT readers know, I’m all for energy efficiency and conservation when applied in a meaningful way. For example, a few months back, I retrofitted my home with some very cool LED recessed lighting. You can read my About page to see some of my other energy saving projects.
WUWT readers also know that I’m against Catlinesque stunts. Earth Hour, while born of good intentions, is one of those stunts that really doesn’t amount to any long term meaningful energy savings. In fact it doesn’t really even amount to any short term savings.
For example, last year, according to the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), Earth Hour made zero difference to the California power consumption. Zero, zip, nada. Have a look at the graph:
Big Hat tip to Roger Sowell for the graphs:
Some greens were quick to point out “but look the power dropped then”.
Yah, it does that every day about that time:
If there was a big effect from Earth Hour, you’d see a step event as everybody turned off their lights in Califonia. Plus, the greens don’t seem to realize that no power plants get switched off, so there’s really no CO2 savings. The power plants are run based on demand forecast. Short term spikes from well intentioned stunts really don’t make a blip of difference to Co2 emissions.
For WUWT readers that wish to track this year’s California Earth Hour impact in real time, you can visit the CAISO tracker:
http://www.caiso.com/outlook/SystemStatus.html
Have fun. Let us know what you did for Earth Hour.
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UPDATE: Thanks to a commenter challenge, I was obliged to look for some other real-time power monitoring locations, this one in Ontario Canada for example:
http://www.ieso.ca/imoweb/siteShared/demand_price.asp?sid=ic
For a fun project, WUWT readers can find their own local power reporting website and post up results here, and I’ll do a new post showcasing the effects of Earth Hour worldwide.
To post images or screencaps in comments use http://www.tinypic.com/ or a similar service and just paste the full image URL in the comments, no tags needed. – Anthony
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Here is a 7-day graph that updates every 5 minutes. It’s from the Bonneville Power Administration in the Pacific northwest. It includes a separate time series for wind power generation.
http://www.transmission.bpa.gov/business/operations/Wind/baltwg.aspx
If you remove the baltwg.aspx portion of the address shown in your browser address bar it will take you to a page with links to other graphs and also datasets.
One thing’s for certain: no one in Kentucky or West Virginia will be participating.
Nor will I.
Didn’t even know it was happening – I thought they’d given up that nonsense.
I’ll be too busy watching a movie… but the lights in my family room will be off while we’re watching it, does that count for anything ? Maybe I can get a carbon credit for that or something ?
So I’m curious…
Do you think all of the WalMart’s et al will be observing “earth hour” at 8:30 pm (right in the middle of their peak customer shopping time ?
Hardy har har.
We celebrate Earth Hour here every day — except we have to celebrate at differing times, depending when the generators need an oil change.
Today, we celebrated it between 0937 and 1055.
And then again between 1830 and 1948.
For all of you who have missed the opportunity to switch off your non-essential lights during Earth Hour, there’s still Earth Day (April 22) and Earth Week (the week around April 22):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Day
And there’s still Bike-To-Work-Day, UN World Environment Day, UN World Population Day, Zero Emissions Day, Car Free Day, Ecological Debt Day (a.k.a Earth Overshoot Day), International Day Of Climate Action and Green Office Week. To name some of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_environmental_dates
I wonder what happened to Carbon Footprint Day.
Oh, i forgot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_Fools_Day
How could i.
Turning off the lights is demonstrating that people care about their planet and are ready to accept some changes in order to protect it..
Phooey. If people limited their consumption every damned hour, every day, then that would be demonstrating a willingness to accept change. Turning off your lights for an hour is moral grandstanding, a competitive game of ‘holier than thou.’
LOL as the moment approaches look at the ontario power link….
Heh heh
Ya, that Ontario link is interesting. What would cause that spike between 8PM and 9PM? Did everyone first turn on all of their lights and then turned them all off to make the whole experience more dramatic?
I’ll run my downstairs heat pump on heat, the upstairs unit on cool, make sure the pool pump is running, rev up the washer and the dryer, throw some brownies into the oven, and boil some water on the stove. Then I’ll turn out my lights.
My wife and I are on opposite sides of this divide.
(I am an electrical power systems engineer and have some knowledge of the forces at play here. I will just say that I think the entire Earth Hour exercise is sophomoric.)
So, at 8:30, I turned on every light in the house to make my feelings visible. My wife huffed and stomped around calling me every name in the progressive playbook as she was turning on the dishwasher and then went upstairs and to spend 30 minutes with her hairdryer.
A huge spike in electricity unit after 8 pm in Ontario. Looks like we had to increase a coal burning electricity plant.
http://www.sygration.com/gendata/today.html
California is the greenest state? Well maybe, if green is a political hue, if you want to think so.
But as for the color green, Oregon is far greener than brownish CA. In spring you can drive down a country road in western Oregon and count at least 1,000 shades of green. The retinas reel at the verdure.
Do people realise that the whole thing is meant as a symbolic gesture? Trying to work out the actual energy savings (or otherwise) entirely misses the point. I’m not sure why symbolism suddenly has a bad name.
The world wide gesture also demonstrates some marvelous human qualities quite aside from the issue it’s about. However misguided you think the cause, leavening your opprobrium with some reflection on the goodness of the human spirit that lies behind this event – irrespective of AGW – would be a mature and generous act.
Contempt is easy and obvious. Endless contempt is tawdry.
I had completely forgotten about this farce! I just did my usual Saturday night thing, had a feed, some beer and watched a bit of TV with the missus. We don’t use a lot of power anyway, amounts to about AU$150 per quater which, according to my power bill, produces a whopping 0.77 tonnes of CO2 from 721.8kWh’s.
We’re all gunna die!!!!!
I was trying to figure this out……..the times didn’t seem right……this is power consumption for Great Britain.
Electricity demand – Last 24 Hours
http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/Data/Realtime/Demand/demand24.htm
“barry (19:09:11) :
Do people realise that the whole thing is meant as a symbolic gesture? Trying to work out the actual energy savings (or otherwise) entirely misses the point. I’m not sure why symbolism suddenly has a bad name.”
Since it comes from the WWF?
Damn! You people are bitter! Sounds to me like both camps just want to be arrogant and find a reason to look down on other people. Turning on every light in your house to protest? You go, champ. Sounds kind of stupid to me. I don’t care about global warming or climate change or whatever the current buzz phrase happens to be. It’s about fiscal responsibility. One hour makes no difference unless you begin to realize there are appliances and lights you leave on that just waste energy. That was my goal from the start. So hate me and whine about my empty gestures or, oh my God, write a blog in protest. Yeah, that’ll have impact, too.
@ur momisugly JD (17:45:19) :
http://i39.tinypic.com/w98b2d.jpg
Looks like “middle finger” to me LOL
BTW. Power demand was : 15874 MW at 8:00 PM
15936 MW at 9:00 PM !!!!
15397 MW at 10:00 PM
This is Ontario’s electical usage for 6-7 pm, 7-8pm, 8-9pm and 9-10 pm in MWh
16439 16705 16657 16724
seeing that today is a Saturday and fewer people are coming home from work at 5 or 6, dinner is usually earlier, around 6. The increased usage before 8? Preparations for earth hour black out parties?
Why isn’t earth hour at least as low as dinner hour, 6 to 7 pm?
Notice the increase in the 9 to 10 pm hour. After black out party celebrations?
Barry, nobody is picking fun at a symbolic gesture. Nobody knows this is a symbolic gesture. We are looking at the results and it costs energy; it does not save it.
I turned my lights ON….
“barry (19:09:11) : ”
But Barry the CO2 is still being emitted by the power stations because the power, not being consumed during Earth Hour, is still being generated. This gesture symbolises ignorance in the poeple who don’t understand where their power comes from, how it is generated (And how you just simply cannot turn it off at the source for an hour) and delivered.
If I was spying on Al Gores mansion at 8:30pm, here is what I might observe..
At 8:30 he starts moving around to switch off lights. It takes a while to get that big frame moving.
At 9:30 he has managed to switch off HALF the lights of the huge mansion. Has had no time to get to the pool area or the patio, nor time to get to the basement to turn off the central heating. Time to start switching back on.
At 10:30 he is back to his 32″ computer monitors. Being a concerned citizen and feeling a little guilty that one hr wasn’t enough to switch everything off, he calls the Times to say what a great success Earth Hour was and that from next year it should be extended to 2 hrs.